Surely there was no way this was happening again. The Washington Wizards, mired at the bottom of the Eastern Conference, were down 17 in the second quarter at home and showing no life whatsoever.
It was enough to make a coach start pacing the bench.
"I just walked down and said, 'We're better than we're playing,' " coach Ed Tapscott said. "And, 'We need to bring more energy to everything we're doing.' You can't expect to walk between possessions, walk during timeouts and then all of a sudden fire up. We've just got to get ourselves moving."
So Tapscott turned to his subs, and they responded. Caron Butler's 33 points were supplemented by a season-high 16 from Juan Dixon (Calvert Hall, Maryland) and 15 from Darius Songaila as the Wizards rallied for a 107-94 victory last night over the redesigned lineup of the Detroit Pistons.
Songaila, Dixon (seven assists), Dominic McGuire (3-for-3, six points), Andray Blatche (eight points, five rebounds), and Nick Young (nine points) all provided inspired play off the bench, a necessity because the Washington starters not named Butler combined to score only 15 points.
"Sometimes the five guys who come out and start can't do it by themselves," said Songaila, whose biggest play might have been a momentum-swinging backdoor layup when the Pistons were trying to make a late run. The Wizards improved to 3-5 under interim coach Tapscott (4-15 overall), while the Pistons have lost four of five and dropped to 7-9 (11-9 overall) since the trade for Allen Iverson. Iverson started at shooting guard last night but he wasn't much of a factor, scoring 13 points.
"It doesn't have anything to do with one player. It has to do with all of the players," Iverson said. "I don't think one player has to do with having a 17-point lead, and then it dissolves like that."
Richard Hamilton scored a season-high 29 points, Rasheed Wallace added 19, and new starting point guard Rodney Stuckey had 10 points and 11 assists for the Pistons. Hamilton and Wallace each were called for technical fouls for fussing at the refs.
"Right now, we're a team [that] when things are not going good, we give in to it," coach Michael Curry said. "We unravel a little bit. We lose our composure. We can't be a team like that. We have to be mentally tough."
Cavaliers 114, Raptors 94: : LeBron James scored 31 points and set the team record for career steals, Zydrunas Ilgauskas became the Cavaliers' career leader in rebounds, and Cleveland (18-3) moved to 12-0 at home. The Raptors fell to 8-12.
